Post Human Wars
by JonasGrant
Summary: What do you do when you're trapped some alien piece of hardware that makes you the perfect weapon? You fight until there is nothing left to fight, then go look for another war, because that's all you have left. Fortunately, in the grim darkness of the far future, war never ends.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: So many story ideas all popping up at the same time, can't write them all at once D: This one is a more elaborated version of my story Feral, although this time involving Nanosuits instead of a whole people of predators. It'll also serve as training for my other story, Fall.**

**I've also been asked what the deal with 40k is. Truth be told, I'm a fan, simple as that, no particular faction or game or novels, I just love writing in it, everything's possible, the main factions are always a challenge to the protagonist and the fanboy rage is always a nice touch, although never the cause for a story. I might like to irk the Matt Ward wankers, but I will never write Suefic or stompfics, too many of those already, although kicking a few characters I think are overrated is not bellow me. I'm only human.**

They call me Raider, I like it. They call me a terrorist, I don't like it as much. They don't know what it was like for us C.E.L.L. mooks down in the street, trying to keep the sick from contaminating the healthy, dodging Ceph, Prophet, Alcatraz and all the while dealing with Lockheart's lunacy and hate for us PHS, Post-Human Soldiers. Hargreaves would send us on special assignments every now and then and every time, the Marines, C.E.L.L. remnants and Ceph would hit us hard. Were it not for our suits and my team's exemplary discipline under fire, Alcatraz would have been a Ceph's Nano-trophy faster that you can say 'fuck'. Especially true in that crazy mute's case…

In any event, I'm a Ranger, used to be anyway, from the seventy fifth. Yeah, _that_ good. Rangers ditched me after ten years of faithful service for breaking rules of engagement in Afghanistan, so C.E.L.L. took me on board and soon tossed me as Colonel of the PHS 1.5 Program's military aspects, with Prophet leading PHS 2, although not quite knowingly…

Now, I'm locked away in a cell, fully suited; they'd rather I would take the suit off, but even then, the outer layers are not really the suit, _I_ am the suit, is fused to my skin, replaced it, more accurately, broke down many of my organs for raw materials, such as most of my digestive and reproduction system, absorbing and injecting me with nutrients directly from sunlight, particles suspended in the air and the suit's on board power plant. At this point, I'm just a slice of meat with some bones stuck in a shell of living plastic which I can direct around but not control.

I'd love to take off this piece of shit. You ever hear the term 'blessed with suck'? Found it on ; fits me like a glove.

I'll explain: This suit keeps me from dying. Even brain damages are repaired given time, the very idea of falling sick is ridiculous, as this whole thing is a fucking bioweapon, and aging apparently isn't an issue when you're essentially a walking corpse in armor.

Hygiene is, though; I've had a bit of Ceph tissue stuck in my knuckle covers for a month and those bastards won't give me a toothbrush to get it out.

Across my cell's steel bars, I see Vendetta draw an elaborated tribal rose on the farthest wall of he own cage, using just her fingers.

Vendetta never had any talent for drawing, but her SECOND interface allows her to be skilled at whatever the fuck she wishes to be.

Female Nanosuits wearers look nothing like males, mirroring the different morphologies; they have a bit more Coltan-Titanium protecting the chest area and thinner CryFibril strands. This manifest as slight differences in performance that were never worth noting in my opinion, although I guess the additional hard plates help protect them from impacts while the thinner muscles increase mobility.

PHS women have padding and flexibility, nothing new in my opinion.

Ven is just one of many C.E.L.L. operatives that came along when I surrendered. I wanted to help fight the Ceph, but was locked in here with my surviving Battalion.

Six hundred of us are left, all stuck in this prison floating in high orbit.

The space station used to be an experimental base for the Marine Corps' own PHSs, but after the war, it turned to just a place to lock up anyone with Nanosuits and not U.S. Military; that means British, North Korean, Chinese, Russian, French and Israeli Post-Human Soldiers populate this thing, not all locked up, but effectively prisoners like me.

We're too dangerous to be let free, too powerful to be controlled and to well known by civvies to be executed. Even then, trying to kill all five hundred thousand PHSs here would basically be the last mistake any army would make.

Yeah, _that _many. The space station is huge, but even then, it wasn't meant to house that number of residents and has shown signs of falling apart recently; lights going down without explanation and coming back up after days, water running out for days on end –still out now- guards discussing how fucked they are in the security booth, two hundred meters to the right.

I hear them loud and clear, despite their conviction of the contrary. They're not exactly wrong to believe I am oblivious; I used Ceph Nano-Catalysts and scans of Prophet's suit to improve my armor while theirs are vanilla models…

From what I understood, we 'Drifted'; one moment we were above Earth and about to be attacked by a massive Ceph ship, the next we're in deep space, sending out distress signals and praying to shit someone comes check, even the Ceph.

"Chief, you good?" Ven speaks, not looking back from her drawing, now spanning the whole wall and featuring elegant swirls and thorns. She was blinded by a tactical nuke in Japan and her suit compensated with some creepy shit RADAR/LADAR/SONAR sense that replace visual input. She says it's like standing in a room with a thousand mirrors all pointed at her confusing at first, but once she became used to it, it gave her full 360 vision over short distances.

"Yeah, all good." I reply, sitting down on my bed, "Thirsty."

She nods, "Hear you on that."

Conversation's over. We're both not very talkative, odd, seeing as we were in the rangers together and joined C.E.L.L. a year apart, we're not in a disagreement or whatever, we're just the kind of people that can hang together and not feel the need to fill every silence with bullshit small talk attempts.

This isn't as boring as you'd think, I have internet access in my suit, can talk to every single PHS in the station whenever I want to, have every single video game ever produced installed in my suit along with DLCs and collectors editions and have over a two hundred hours of porn saved.

Porn doesn't have the same appeal it used to, I can appreciate naked human beings for their aesthetic and such, but feel no sexual impulses or desire. You'd think that would change a lot of things, but it didn't, really, I just use the time I spent jerking off doing constructive shit.

Granted, constructive shit has revolved around reading books ever since I got locked up, and I couldn't connect to internet ever since that drift issue, but what the fuck, at least I educate myself.

But if I must read one more novel written by some Mormon girl about sexy god-like vampires, I rip this cell open and go on a killing spree.

Might as well see what's going on: I open the Quantum Resonance… Thing… Yeah, look I've got no clue what it is, I just know it came from the Russians, used a tiny bit of my Catalyst reserves and allowed me to send instant text messages to everyone wearing a Nanosuit no matter where they are.

_Raider: Yo, what's the news everyone? _

It just appears as a small line of text at the bottom of their HUDs, but most of them are probably bored to shit and as much as they hate me, this line is going to bug them until someone replies.

Two new lines pop at about the same time on my HUD:

_Nomad: STFU._

_Uriel: U r gay._

Charming. Nomad doesn't usually have much of a beef with me, we played poker online together until recently and both decided what happened in NYC was a massive clusterfuck for everyone involved and to just leave it at that. No clue who Uriel is.

_Psycho: Guys, you suck. I dunno, Raid, yanks are takin' the piss on this one._

Psycho… I think that guy shot at me a while back, in NYC.

_Hitman: I am talking things over with the Marines to get you and your men released. The situation has evolved._

That's not good. Well, anything's better than being locked up in this shit hole, but if they need my boys, then something bad is going on.

Ven caught on to the exchange and is stepping away from her drawing, before leaning her back on the cell door. No more messages pop up. That's odd when there's half a million men and women listening in. In fact, most of the time I have SECOND filter unwanted texts; everyone's awfully quiet today…

_Raider: Problems?_

_Nomad: Aliens got on the fucking ship. Not Charybdis._

Fuck the marines, I'm not waiting for them to get their heads out of their asses just to end up with a probe in mine. "All sections," I speak in by Brigade's com channel, "form up at the third deck armory, gear up and wait for instructions." I walk up to the door… -**Maximum Power- **…**a**nd rip it off its hinges in one pull. A thunderstorm of groaning metal, akin to someone scratching their nails on a black board, follows soon after as six hundred C.E.L.L. PHS bust through reinforced titanium doors like they're made of paper. A few priority video feeds show the Korean People's Army boys doing the same and just following my troops around. I send a request to their General, asking that we share tactical data and cooperate should things go bad.

The answer comes in the form of a massive influx of data to my SECOND interface. Seventy thousand soldiers; the Chinese are cooperating with them as well, even though they weren't locked up.

Never seen the Chinese Nanosuits… Wonder if they have Made In China stamped all over…

Outside my cell, I am met with a hundred C.E.L.L. or so. Whole block was dedicated to us, it seems.

I nod to the right side of the hall and we make our way past about fifty cells, already empty, the occupants far ahead, from the looks of it.

The two U.S. Marines guarding the cell block don't bother to leave their station and actually open the door for us, information that I pass along to other officers.

They must tell their men not to cause trouble, because the whole prison break goes smoothly. Mako, one of my greenest recruits, actually asks a Marine for direction to the armory. He gets them.

Everyone on the station is tired as shit, tired of being treated like shit, tired of hating the only other human beings to accept them, tired of bullshit.

Busting out of our cells broke something. Orders, flags, friends, paycheck, all of these seem pretty pointless now, we're never getting back into the real world. We're all in this shit together.

We're all past the point of no bullshit.


	2. Chapter 2

Psycho's british, you muppet. First thing I learn when entering the armory. And Psycho seems to have met with an old friend, the Korean Colonel. None of my fuckin' business.

The armory was built in the former shuttle maintenance bay; it's large, filled wall to wall with weapon prototypes and very poorly lit. I like it.

Not because of the guns, I don't like guns, I don't hate them either, but I never really built the link most U.S. Army soldiers build with their guns. I'll ditch mine for a better one any day of the week, despite the eighty-five bucks I must usually pay for loosing army gear. C.E.L.L. let you buy your own weapons straight from the factory at face value and you could do whatever the fuck you wanted with it.

One of many perks I had under Hargreaves; I'd go through weapons like they were condoms, use when necessary, ditch when done and get a different flavored one that matches your current tastes…

That metaphor just went somewhere horrible.

It's buzzing with activity, PHSs grabbing microwave guns, K-Volts, Gauss rifles, and a few swords from crates that were forced open like that wrapping around your gift at Christmas when you were a kid.

There isn't five hundred thousand of us in this armory, howver, not even six hundred, like I'd expected; my men end up finding other armories around the station and decided to arm there, just in case.

Every team leader is sending me the location of the new armories, same as the Korean and Chinese commanders.

I'm counting two hundred stockpiles as large as the one I'm in now. Too many. Enough to arm every single PHS on the station, but far too many for its purpose. This is no armory, this is storage. I bet you won't find any technology here not related to the Ceph, like they crammed this station full of every piece of reverse-engineered tech they could find and tossed it in deep space.

Vendetta seems to agree with me, as she rips open the cover of a coffin sized container and pull a lot of foam from it before finding the shiny stuff inside.

Shiny isn't a way of saying cool or interesting; it's a big reflective bluish… Thing, the size of a machine gun and with actual machine gun handles.

Psycho interrupts his conversation to warn her not to mess with that. "MOAC," he explains, "will freeze the balls right off a polar bear."

I spot a high quality CryNet storage locker almost right next to the door; the size of a shoe box, hardened edges, expensive lock, weapon R&D stamp over it, has to be worth a look.. Complex biometric locks prevent me from opening it right away, but I have hacking protocols and I'm curious. Speaking of being curious…

I turn to Psycho and Ven, apparently arguing on who's got the most experience with alien tech; the merc who helped field test the prototypes, or the Delta force who found the originals. I say if you're wearing Nanosuit, you're badass enough to handle anything, but I still have to know; "Are we being attacked by polar bears?"

Big fucking hairy space polar bears. Wouldn't surprise me at this point.

Everyone within hearing distance turns to stare at me. Even the god damned Koreans are giving me weird looks and I doubt they understood a word I just said.

About a hundred visors just reflecting my own. Most of them red, mine's translucent blue.

The Korean colonel sheathes his katana or whatever and picks up a K-volt SMG before barking a few orders to his me and brushing past me, not without answering my question on the way, however.

"No."

There we have it. "Then what?" You know, I make jokes, keep quiet most of the time and am totally fucking awkward when it comes to holding an actual conversation, but I'm a Ranger, an officer and can bench press a tank, so when I ask a question, most people see the point of answering.

That guy is no pushover, but he takes a second and answers nonetheless; "Robots, like terminators, heavily armed, impossible to disable unless you put your nanosuit in direct contact with them." He looks at his hand, the green camouflage plate looks a lot like the lightweight alloy plates I'm wearing, only far less advanced. "They just melt when you touch them," he continues, clenching his hand in a fist, "I do not know why, but my men took four out on the way here. I lost twice as many troops."

His helmet scans the room, we're all looking at him now, so he sighs and elaborate: "To put it simply; do not engage them in firefights, too much firepower, you must get up close and keep nano weave in contact with them for five good seconds to do any lasting damage."

Then, he walks out the door and something hits me.

Why is there gravity here? I mean, there's always been gravity on the station, but I never questioned how that was possible. I'll ask later.

For now… Is that a bow?

The hacking protocols did the trick and the box popped open, revealing gleaming silver on black foam.

The thing is all folded on itself, packed tighter than a contortionist trying to smuggle past the border.

I never tried a bow. SECOND is showing me the basics of how to shoot one and comparing it with ordinary projectile weapons. That thing has CryFibril nano-weave for rope and backing its arms; it must throw arrows real far, real fast, real hard. I'll hold on to it for now…

Unlike the vanilla N2, my suit, an N2.1A, has pockets, sheathes, holsters and weird hooks on the back of the belt where I hang my new toy.

Will need arrow for it. How hard can it be to find arrows for a high-powered nano-tech bow? They sure won't fit in a 4mm flechette ammo crate.

Vendetta tosses me Gauss rifle and some clips for it, which I also stow on my back and pockets. Wonder who's fighting these alien, because my men have not reported any contact and the Koreans are the only one I know of who had some run ins with them. Without actual report, I can't decide whether to stock up in priority or just rush in to reinforce our lines.

Psycho can hook me up with the other task forces, he seems pretty reliable. And he's British, you muppet.

Currently, however, he seems content with trying to slap a red dot scope on a micro wave canon, which is kinda stupid if you ask me. "Hey, what's everyone else up to?" Is the only way I guess I can phrase this beyond 'Why the fuck is everyone standing around looking retarded when we're getting hit by terminators?'

He seems to know exactly what's in my mind, however, because he actually laughs and shake his head. "Americans insist they should be the only ones handling this, what with that station being made in USA and all that bullocks, but most everyone else just does whatever the bloody hell they want and with you and your boys just busting out…" He rolls a length of duct tape around the gun to hold the scope steady, then looks back up to me, "Well, no leadership, no intel and no esprit de corps." He laughs again and nods to the fifty C.E.L.L. PHS waiting for my instructions and checking each other's gear.

"What?" I don't get what he means by that, we're keeping a strict military discipline and my men are all excellent warriors.

"You wankers are the only ones I've seen so far who seem to take this shite seriously, but everyone still reports whatever they find to me so I can pass it along," he's wearing a mask, but I can hear him scowl, "but no one gives a rat's ass about anyone else's intel, so the 'bots are walking around trying to kill anyone they find. Usually ends with our guys sneaking away and reporting to me."

He spread his arms in a disheartened way, "And all I can do is nod and pass it along." He points to me and then to Vendetta, "You guys want to fight? I'll get you to the fights, first, go check out deck thirty one, section five," Second pops a nav marker at that position, knowing I'm gonna say yes before I do, "I got an Australian sniper whining about being stuck or something."

Sure, let's save an Aussie. "Can you patch me with him?"

"What am I? Speed dating animator? Figure it out."

Oh well.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: I'd advise anyone that wants actual number to just check out the Space Battles thread Space Marine vs Alcatraz, it has accurate numbers and excellent sources, and it won't waste both our time. If you want to know about anything not mentionned on that thread, feel free to ask, however.**

**0**

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"Sir!" Whiskers is the third of twenty men I bring along, he's now jogging up to me with his hand full of pipes or straws… Arrows.

I don't have a quiver or anything, but there's an autoloader on the bow, so I sling the Gauss Rifle and draw the folded up weapon on my lower back, fitting six arrows in the loader and hanging on to the remaining four.

All monomolecular carbide tipped arrows. Fired from a bow that requires Power Mode active to fully draw, these things could punch through two centimeters of titanium easily. Then again, if I end up facing something with two centimeters-thick titanium plating, I'll most likely use the Gauss on it, or have some of the boys use alien guns or something.

Speaking of which, I got six men, including Ven, carrying MOAC; cold based weapons that either flash-freeze their targets or hurl icicles at them and have only a short effective range. I could put three of them up front and two in the back. Ven staying next to me, as she's my XO, after all.

Then, I have four boys with X-43 MIKEs, microwave guns; I put them right behind our front line so they can cook whatever doesn't freeze…

No, that won't work; I can't fit more than three men side by side, corridors are too tight, and I'd rather we don't all get killed in a single burst, so I'll send three of my Marksmen with bows or Gauss rifles with the first line –composed of three MOACs, two X-43 and three Gausses- and let them move draw attention while the rest of us follow at a safe distance and flank anything that cause trouble.

Only issue here is how long we'll take to maneuver into other corridors to reach flanking positions; see, the station is bee hive shaped, with hallways, rooms and cells clustered tightly together and separated by thin but vacuum-worthy walls.

I have twenty soldiers at my disposal for this, not a single more as every soldier I pull from patrol and blockade duty is one soldier that won't keep these aliens from flanking us, so I'll send the eight boys in the obvious and easy way to our target –the nav point- while two teams of six, led by Vendetta and I, will sneak in the adjacent rooms and hallways. First sign of trouble, they'll tear a hole in the ceiling, walls, floor or whatever's convenient, and provide support to the main force.

Most of my men are ex-special forces, they wouldn't have been sent to PHS program if they were average grunts, so I reveal my plan and listen to every input they have for me.

First output comes from an ex-Navy SEAL, Snowman, leaning on a bulkhead and performing a quick check up on his Gauss rifle. Snowman thinks I should pull the bowmen from the main force and replace them with Gauss guys, as the secondary teams will need to be silent and a bow is much less noticeable.

Second idea comes from a Chinese Lieutenant two levels lower –or higher, doesn't really matter in space- who suggests we coordinate that push with theirs. They don't know for sure if there are actually any aliens between them and the elevator shaft –neither do we- but they made it their motto to always expect shit to go south, so they'd rather we make this a coordinated effort. I don't mind, this will keep some of the pressure off my boys should the aliens try to keep us from moving forward.

Next input comes from Fulcrum, my best pilot and worst shot. He's packing a K-Volt SMG, his idea is that those would be much more effective in a firefight against machines than the MOACs and the freeze guns should be kept for the secondary team, as they fill a more supportive purpose and need to be at hugging range to be effective, making them better used when flanking.

A good point. I do just that, but still leave one trooper with a high-tech freezer, in case the K-Volts don't do shit and the X-43 take too long to cook their targets.

And that's about it. The Chinese are ready when we are, the guys are checking each other's gear one last time and I'm running a full diagnostic of all their suits.

Nanosuits have so much integrated systems and hardware they usually need a full support crew to provide real-time logistical support, but we don't have that crew now, so I'm taking the whole shit upon myself and linking their data feeds to my SECOND.

Instead of having a full-time squad status displayed on my HUD, I make it so their life signs, suit status and relevant data feed access all appear over their heads. If I select one of them, a live camera feed from their helmets pops in the lower corner of my HUD and relevant medical and technical stuff is voiced by second.

I try it with Vendetta;

**Operative VENDETTA is showing signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, light malnutrition, sleep deprivation and advanced dehydration. Severe occular damages detected. Condition yellow. Combat capable. Evacuation for rest and recovery advised. **

Her helmet feed shows a gray wall and nothing else. She doesn't see like I do, so she doesn't need to look around. At time, this makes her look more machine than human, as she just stands there, taking in everything but never reacting to it.

She's earned some R&R, we all did, I'll make sure everyone gets some once we're out of trouble.

"Let's do this!" I then bark, "Main force is led by Sergeant Snowman," I nod to the old SEAL and he raises his thumb in agreement, "codenamed Blue team," Usually, in the Rangers, the SEALS, the S.A.S. or the Marines, teams are already assembled, but PHSs are meant to operate on their own or in small, task oriented teams, so we don't have pre-established units, "Vendetta's group will be Red team and mine is Yellow."

SECOND highlights four paths that will keep us as close to Blue team as possible, but there's a catch. There's always a catch; the first one involves crawling in a maintenance conduit that runs parallel to the corridor all the way to the elevator shaft, but provides very little maneuverability and cover.

Yeah, crawling on all four isn't the best tactical position.

Next path is to the left of the main group and has only two rooms along its length, meaning very tight spaces and no room to maneuver.

Third one, also to the left, gets us through a few rooms controlled by the Chinese or Koreans, but has about four hundred meters, spread along its length at various spots, where we won't be in contact with the main corridor.

Last one, on the right, stays in contact all along, but the Koreans lost three men when scouting it.

I'm many things, but I'm not a hero and I'm not brave; I choose the third option while Vendetta picks the conduit. Crazy bitch.

See, many people think I train hard and focus solely on the mission because I love to fight. I don't. I hate fighting, I hated my time as a soldier and if I could go back, I'd never enlist, but soldiering is all I'm good at now, especially with the suit, so I'm stuck as a warfighter and an officer, and if I botch my job or try to get away from it, people I care about die. Me included. Not many people I care about more than myself, truth be told.

Enough bullshit. Let's move.

Twenty meters down the hall and to the left is our way into the first room of the set. We make our way there quickly and Whiskers opens the way in, his freezer gun held ready.

I follow, along with another archer, arrow ready to sting whatever doesn't look friendly.

Four Korean PHSs are not exactly friendly looking, but they're easy to recognize, so I hold fire and look around the room.

Eight square meters of nothing but gray metal with a heavy duty bulkhead to the right.

They use this section as a staging area and the four Nanosuit soldiers before me act as technical support for their brethren, same way I do for my team.

Two are just sitting on the floor, completely caught up in their duties, one is keeping an eye on the hatch we just crossed and another is inspecting a stockpile of K-Volts and reloading batteries with suit energy.

The guy guarding the hatch lower his gun and nods, sending me a simplified data feed that highlights the positions of his team mates on my HUD.

Eight checkpoints, all set up in rooms such as this one. Two checkpoints are reporting contact and one, halfway between those two, has gone silent.

Can mean about anything, Koreans are far behind Crynet in their understanding of Ceph technology and their suits utterly suck, it's possible they just suffered coms malfunction.

Whiskers open the bulkhead and the thing lowers into the floor slowly, revealing the dark hallway beyond. Koreans cut the cables powering the neons and jacked them in their suit's power supply to increase the efficiency of their armor mode. I couldn't do that; my suit's electronics would fry.

**Nanovision Enabled.**

Everything becomes shades of gray and colorful spots. Mostly just shades of gray though.

Thirty meters to the next bulkhead and first checkpoint, all clear, let's speed this up.

**Maximum Power.**

The walls blur and the bulkhead jumps to meet me and I stop ten steps away to aim my bow at the sealed entrance while Whiskers, MOAC in hands, punches the green button to the right.

Golem, a very tall and muscular operator, takes the left, bow in hand, while the rest go prone on my flanks.

That checkpoint is one of the two that reported contact, so we're all expecting trouble.

I kind of hope I get to see what we're up against, because not knowing is driving me nuts.

The bulkhead hisses down and the telltale sound of a K-Volt burst reaches us. A single gun. Either this fight is going well, or it's going very bad.


	4. Chapter 4

If you're not familiar with the Nanosuit, you'd think what I'm doing now it something out of a god damned scifi movie; I'm holding a giant robot off the floor one handed and tearing off its weapon arm like its rotten cheese.

How to say… It's the ultimate heuristic weapon of destruction, even the Ceph were pissed scared of it and it uses their tech. See, the basis is like the Americans using German tech to make the first A bomb; the Nazis knew the tech, they knew exactly what had happened when it went boom, but they never thought for a second anyone could possibly be stupid enough to do it.

My own suit is one of the most advanced piece of hardware Hargreaves even shat out and the second most expensive model ever created, after the Delta N2, but what really set it apart from Ceph tech, because the squids have much better suits than we do, is the human operator; the muscle frame, the shape of the body, the way our arms and legs are meant for powerlifting, the advanced bone structure. We're not the fastest, meanest or strongest fuckers around, but we're built on the same frame as gorillas, who do qualify as badass of the week.

So the Ceph built exo-skeletons to try and go toe to toe with Post Human Warriors around the world and, to some extent, succeeded, but they still lack one thing we have:

Brains. Or spare brains, to be precise, a lot of that hardware in your skull is just there to receive and send signals, the rest of the time, it doesn't do squat. SECOND makes use of all that wasted potential to store information, run diagnostics, calibrate simulations, analyze data and retransmit the whole package to the wearer in the form of hunches, ideas, decisions and illusions of choices.

I'm being mind controlled by a computer which is, essentially, my own brain turned up to eleven. You think it's horrible? You are being mind controlled by your own, limited, meat sauce-flavored bag of misfiring fuses and chemical cocktails.

All of this to say, I knew that fucker would take a swing at me before he did. And by did, I mean before he knew he would.

My suit was built by my former boss for active sampling of Charybdis tech, but the samplers seem to recognize nanotechnology in that flayed skeleton I'm holding up and immediately start data collection while the victim tries to pry my arm off.

No such luck; suit power is still at fifty percent.

The suit also begins 'Deep Layer Disruption Protocoles'. No clue what it is, but I see what it does; I break the fucker down. The skull melts and drips to the floor, the legs rot off and fall, followed by the mechanical eyeballs and some of the liquid silvery good it's turning into crawls up my arm like the suit itself did the first time I tried to take it off, soon covering my whole body.

Then, SECOND groans something about insufficient common code and my new chrome skin falls right off.

Additional sampling will be required to build effective bio-code bridge.

I don't need the AI to voice it, I know it before it can produce a sound, but the voice is reassuring so it keeps talking.

One enemy downed four Koreans, flayed alive, leaving only scarred skeletons, and a fifth PHS; the last man standing. The suit and skin of the NK was torn right off under knee level and his NOM adaptor is still jacked to the station's nuclear reactor. Whatever hit him rip the shit out of his suit in armor mode.

I get a video feed from the injured soldier. It shows the robot thing, now merely a pond on the floor, shooting that twisted gun at his pals, sucking their suit energy dry and skinning them alive in a few more hits. He managed to throw off its aim and hold it back by plugging his K-Volt straight to his suit's power capacitors.

Which mean he must have hit this guy with enough voltage to power a small town and still it wasn't enough.

Well, we know our suit's cyber and bio warfare suits are capable of killing the things quickly, that's at least something. Whiskers, to the right, picks up the discarded axe-gun and tries it on the wall, punching a round, head-sized hole right through the biosteel.

The KPA commando's leg soon gets covered by yellow honeycomb-like substance that replaces his skin and begins to excrete pitch black nanofibrils, effectively rebuilding the armor before our eyes,

Regen isn't usually that fast, but the suit seems to use the liquefied robot for raw materials.

Then, we take the commando with us to the next checkpoint, where the China People Army, led by some hardcore Sergeant nicknamed Hei Gui, are holding position quite splendidly, drawing foes to close combat and taking the on at knife range before stealing their weapons.

Two of them agree to a trade with two of my own men, exchanging our Gauss rifles for alien weapons.

In the main corridor, the team is getting very little opposition, which is odd, seeing as the alien 'bots we encounter seem to be coming in from that area.

Black Ghost… I mean Hei Gui… Whatever, means the same thing, SECOND is just trying to translate stuff for me when I don't really need it.; I'm quite fluent in Mandarin, although I must admit, these guys are hyped up on adrenaline and using military slang, so I only get one third of what they say.

SECOND knows I need translation before I do. Ain't he man's best friend?

Truth be told, I miss SANTA, that Ho Ho Ho thing he did on boot up was one fuck of a way to start a high risk mission, and the way he tagged friend and foes as Good and Naughty always cracked me up. And don't get me started on the 'Steady, Rudolf!" thing he randomly did when there was stuff shooting at our helo. SANTA felt like a friend, SECOND feels more like a tool… Maybe once I get enough samples from these aliens to turn them into nano-catalysts, I can find the SANTA protocols in the suit's deep layer and bring the old man back…

That's just a flash, a thought run through the suit's quantum processors and brought to a term before I finish blinking.

The Chinese are holding on quite nicely, so we move on to the next checkpoint, held by a collection of KPA and PLA troops. Those two, brought together, seem to kick a lot of ass. They jammed the four bulkheads halfway down and use them as cover while using every trick in the book to outsmart the robots laying siege.

A dozen of them are cloaked and maneuvering around the attackers to thrust deeply into their rear guard in a maneuver more commonly known as Rapid Assault and Precise Extermination, RAPE, for short, and since this is done using Advanced Suit Systems, this is ASS RAPE, and the robots are getting positively pounded by small Asians with big calibers, so we move on and let them have their fun.

Next set of checkpoints are all very well off and quite bored. I distribute a few sit reps to those with com failures and collect samples from whatever goo piles I can find, reaching an alien tissue vector of eighty percent before reaching the elevator shaft.

Main team has not encountered a single hostile on the whole god damned way, but Vendetta's boys racked up more kills that the whole KPA, PLA and CELL put together, but then again, that's not really fair; they found the enemy staging area.

Scratch that; they found the enemy's former staging area, burned it to the ground and stocked up on so much gear they had to drop a nav point on the spot for later pickup.

I send the marker to Psycho and he confirms reception. A bunch of Jarheads and S.A.S. are Oscar Mike, they found a possible entry to the alien ship –I didn't know there was a ship- and are stocking up for an assault.

And they don't want my men on board. Bullshit, we're some of the hardest fuckers in this station, all handpicked by Jack and the CryNet board to serve both as field researchers and shock troopers. We're not washouts like those mall cops CELL uses as canon fodders, we're the best mercs money can buy!

But, hey, they want me to find a sniper? I'll find them a sniper, then I'll see what happens and if I don't like it, I'll let them play war and go my own way, do my own shit.


	5. Chapter 5

There's sand all over the place, it fills every joints, every cracks in my alien rifle and every piece of wreckage, the mighty winds blowing off plasma fires like candles all around me. You wouldn't believe how I went from space station to sand storm, but I'll tell you anyway because if you're still around, you must give a shit somehow:

So far, I have yet to get in an honest head on fight with the fuckers attacking us. I dodged a few shots, fired a few back, scavenged some gear, but it's all just been on the fly so far, just pot shots and suppressive fire for the checkpoints we passed by as we went, before and after the elevator shaft, but now, we're in enemy territory, used to be the Australians were bunked down in this sector, but they left to group with the brits and Canadians three levels lower. They left a few operators back, to keep watch, and most of these still report no contact.

I was after a single of them, one who went dark after requesting help, so we just take up the standard patrol routine, splitting up in groups of five to search every corridor and watch every corner.

We breach rooms in by-the-book sweeping maneuvers, advance with eyes on every angle to avoid ambushes if possible, we're doing our jobs like the pros I keep making us out to be and we're not fiding that sniper. No goo either, so we keep looking; he's got to be around, right? Can't just have vanished, right? Right…

Well, we never find the sniper and he quickly gets thrown way down on our priority list when Psycho mentions that someone somewhere had the brilliant idea to look out a port hole…

And we're falling.

Falling is the word he used, I shit you not, and for almost two seconds- an eternity when you're plugged to a quantum computer- I wonder how the fuck you can fall in space.

How the fuck do you think? At terminal velocity and on fire is how, and that station isn't meant to be toasted then hugged by planetary bodies, it's meant to float and house a thousand marines.

There's twice the amount of EEPs, Emergency Escape Pod –which is kind of redundant, 'cause you don't need an escape pod unless there's goddamn emergency- the original occupants would need, but it's… twenty five times less than what we'll require to get everyone out.

Alien ship it is. The PHSs were slow to get moving, too damn confused and weary of each others to fully collaborate, but no one here wants to go splat and everyone agrees taking the ship is the best way to avoid that.

We need a leader. Psycho gets everyone's vote, mine included, though mostly everyone agrees mine doesn't count.

Assholes.

And so we all head for a single NavPoint, way back the way we came, and we drag any KPA, PLA and AAA we find on the way down.

We end up rear guard for the whole damned force, effectively a Nanosuit Corps run by some brit, except without the tanks and ships and shit…

So, the Koreans, Chinese and my rag tag bunch of mercs fall back by stages; KPA falls back first and set up vantage points in corridors, around corners and behind bulkheads, using their better NOM adaptors to power their cloak and strength modes, effectively laying down pinpoint accurate fire from the shadows.

Chinese suits have faster speed modes, but are not as strong or resilient as most, so they hold back while we cover them, hold the line as the other two relocate and haul ass out of there as soon as we're all set.

My men have the thickest armor and most advanced hardware all around but the fewest numbers, so they keep the middle ground, draw most of the attention when the KPA is relocating or the PLA is backing up, but other than that, we're just there for display.

The thing with Nanosuit 2 isn't truly 'Thicker' armor, but a totally different approach to armor mode, using energy dampeners, scale/spike/Kevlar-like nanotubes and an active current passing through the CryFibril and causing is to harden on impacts while remaining quite flexible.

We effectively become walking IFVs for a whole minute. Less, depending on the enemy firepower, and our suit is actively developing new countermeasures every time we get hit, meaning the longer we survive, the harder we are to kill. PLA and KPA have the old armor mode that focuses on healing and hardening on impact, making them somewhat resilient to small arms, but not impervious.

Their only advantage is that they can run this mode constantly, while we must recharge every minute or so, becoming as vulnerable as a grunt coated in Kevlar.

I don't know what it's like for the front guard, but in the rear, it looks as though the aliens just understood what we're trying to do and are desperately trying to reach the ship before us. Or they asked their CIC for our location and one of our boys intercepted the transmission. 'We're in your ship, killing your dudes.'

That would be fun. I'd shoot the dumbass, but the joke would still be hilarious.

So, yeah, we fall back, sector after sector, hallway after hallway, spraying rounds and arrows on the robots and keeping them at bay with energy weapons. Easy and we're moving too fast for it to be a real ranged battle.

It's essentially running away with style, all things considered.

I've seen the boys shoot arrows like there's no tomorrow and can't say it did them much good, so my own bow stays stowed the whole time and by the time I realize I can easily whip up shockers or explosive warheads from available ammunition, we're all stuffed tightly in a… I'm not sure about that, actually. It's dimly lit with green, sickly looking neons, it seems all made out of stone and my olfactory filters fail to spare me the equally sickly smell of this place. It reminds me of heated steel, copper or silver with hints of burnt plastic and vinegar. Nothing alive about that smell, nothing healthy either, it's just wrong.

What happens next? What do you think? We're all crammed in an alien space ship, half a million super-soldiers with six hundred of us with actual degrees in something –I'll let you guess which ones- and not a single soul that knows the first thing about flying this space ship. What do we do? Huddle all together, jack our suits at max strength and armor and shit our pants as we hit atmo.

The tremors start soft enough, like a gravel road on that shitty bike you had as a kid, but it soon grows closer to that shitty rollercoaster you could swear was losing bolts and we all hold on harder.

I remember the last time I entered an airplane, the stupid shit the flight attendant would say: 'In the event of a water landing…'

Water landing? How do you do that? Must take quite a bit of skills to _land_ on water!

'Your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device.'

If my seat cushion gets ripped off the six inches bolts securing it to the floor, I'll most likely be a flotation device myself.

'The captain has turned on the seatbelts indicator…'

For someone supposed to be flying an air liner, this 'Captain' is a real interested in what I'm doing back here. Who made him captain anyway; he's essentially a glorified bus driver!

'In the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure…'

Roof flies off!

That's pretty much what happens here; roof flies off and we all huddle tighter. I can't get a hold of anything, though, so I hold on to one of my men, who's holding on to the corner of the bulkhead.

But his suit's energy has run out and I'm being sucked off my feet by the sudden rush of air. There's a chance he could hold on with his human muscles, but I'm not taking it, my last action won't be to kill one of the men under my command.

So I let go and fly off with the roof a split second after it is gone.

'If you ever get sucked out of the ship at cruise speed… Well you're fucked. Have a pleasant flight.'

I should be piss scared; I'm in lower atmo, the ground is just a sheet of blobs and thin lines and the whole god damned space station and alien ship are falling down all around me, though they are on fire and I'm not, so I guess we've decelerated enough that friction isn't gonna kill me, but I'm not scared, fear is a chemical impulse and SECOND can easily edit it out.

SECOND highlights twelve pieces of wreckage that could potentially protect a living PHS from impact and I use my zero-g propulsors to reach the biggest one; the goddamn alien ship's roof –actually six decks of pyramid-like rock tumbling around on fire.

It's spinning and there's only one access hatch, on the side of the thing. I'll need to time this right to go through the wall of heat and into the manhole, something an average guy sure a shit couldn't do, but I'm jacked to a glorified calculator, it's easy as Pi to me.

I just need to time it so my suit's armor mode turns on long enough to get me through the fire, but not too long, not to fuck with my drag and drift…

Yippy-kay-yay.


	6. Chapter 6

The nanosuit knows that once I'm in the debris, I'm pretty much done, either I live or die. I don't know the odds, but SECOND does, though it refuses to share that information, instead switching my perceptions off for the duration of our little flight.

It's not just knocking me out cold, that's a useless condition, no, the thing links me up with each of my squad mates' own SECOND so I can see what they see and feel what they feel. You get used to it after a while. Nothing to report here, they are scared, though not biologically, meaning it's just a nudging feeling of 'Yep, maybe I'm gonna die here…"

We lost almost a hundred, expelled from the debris and crushed in flight by pieces of junk.

Pretty much a hundred and fifty years of college education, along with… What's that? Five quadrillion bucks of equipment? Just gone, poof! No greater purpose, no glory, all dead.

When I switch back to my own body, it's to find sand and fire everywhere. I do a quick sitrep of the last hour or so, because if I'm still here, then I should care somehow, and move on after making sure at least four hundred of my boys and girls are still alive.

How do I know that when they are scattered pretty over an area the size of Canada? Not with radio, that's for fuckin' sure, I text every company commander, all three of them, who, in turn, text their platoon leaders, four of them each, who contact their squad leaders, who kick their NCOs and just take a fuckin' look around before sending a headcount back up the chain to me.

The same fuckin' thing they did back in WWII… That's fuckin' progress right here.

Thermal, x-ray, electro-mag and audio scans take a second to perform and point me to the magnetic south. Crash is to the east, but the nearest… Thing, is due south. One vehicle, from the looks of it, though it could just as well be a patch of hot iron.

Well, of course, it isn't. Takes me about a minute to get the gunship in my sight and twice as long to perform a tactical analysis.

Three 'Potential Enemy Combatants' scurry around the… I don't know, looks like a VTOL with side doors. The people are just that; people, the kind you find scurrying back on earth… Squishy and soft… So tasty… Nah, just kidding, though I do go through great pains not to be spotted as I inch closer to their landing zone, smack dead in-between two rows of dunes.

The audio cranked up to max, my cloak active, I put one foot ahead of the other, slowly, methodically, an eye locked to the battery icon on my BUD.

I hear them bickering, the gunship's owner, I mean, but SECOND is struggling to translate. Some words make sense; old gothic, latin, French, even before integration, I would have understood bits and pieces, making SECOND useless and feeling a little bit hurt at that. He feeds me threat analysis reports instead, though I never asked for them.

So, robot guys are TL4, threat level 5, about on par with a Ceph Stalker, other Post-Human Soldiers, like Psycho and Vendetta, are TL7, bunnies and kittens are TL1, as there is no TL0, nothing is ever truly armless…

These guys down by the chopper, after much scanning and extrapolating, are TL5, their energy weapons, advanced armor and access to a flying tank effectively making them more of a threat than the robots had been, though I'm fairly certain a single robot could rip right through them. Rock, paper and scissor, we beat the bots, the bots beat the grunts and the grunts beat us…

Okay, not really, I could rip those three apart from where I am and they'd never fire a shot, I've taken Ceph heavies, TL6, head on without breaking a sweat…

The point is, these guys use Ceph tech, making them better suited to take us down than the bots had been.

I reach their VTOL's tail four seconds before the cloak runs dry and materialize out of sight, white-grey, brown-grey and black-grey hexagons clashing with the beige sand.

Their toy is broken, that much is obvious, and none of them has the know-how to fix that junk, now they're bickering over whether to hoof it back home(home being over a few kilometers, as I'm not picking anything on long range scans), or wait for help.

Takes me a second to realize I understand them. _A Second_, being just the right term.

"Captain, this is insane!" A lovely little blonde, way too clean and soft-spoken to be on a battlefield, tells a hard looking officer, dirty, scarred and brusque enough to have been a NCO long before an officer.

"If we stay here, the Necrons will come and finish us off, the man explains, apparently annoyed that he must justify himself, "have faith and the Emperor will guide us through."

I get a sense of a high card being played here, but before blondie can reply, the third crew member steps in, "I have the utmost fate in His guidance, but even the Emperor himself can't save you from your own stupidity; we need a plan before heading out to get lost in the wastes."

He's younger than the Captain, but not by much, he just look it because of a far smaller amount of scars, along with overall better hygiene.

Batteries are back to full and there's something closing in on the long range scans, so I cloak and make my way to a rocky outcrop, shaped like a giant piano, and draw my weapon. No dice, too much sand or not enough water, whichever makes more sense, point is, bastard shines red on my BUD.

Broken.

The movement I spotted is not a dropship, it's not even a transport, it's a goddamn spotter. It stops about a hundred meters out and transmits our precise coordinates to… Someone.

And someone is just excited to see us here, as a dozen robots flicker to existence ten steps from the squishy trio, making it about fifteen meters from me. They are clustered like a formation of old british musketeers, but facing the wrong way, _my _way.

Doesn't last long, though; the humans take cover behind their VTOL, by the nose, troop bay and tail, respectively, and open up on our Terminator's fan club.

Should I duck out or join in? You know what they say; the enemy of my enemy…

Just shat his pants. I soar across the gap like an… Okay, like a flailing ape or a flayed Mike Tyson. Look, this thing's not graceful, I'm no gymnast, and when I land in armor mode, shit gets torn. The 'bot I land on bends under the weight and the massive axe-cannon slips from its grip as a result.

I snatch it in mid-air and decapitate the nearest toy soldier with it, kicking another in the tibia as it takes aim. The shot goes wild, mine hits home and rips a massive chunk out of the bot's chest.

A rather enterprising tin man swings at me like a lumberjack, from the side. SECOND and I move as one, jumping, curling in a ball as the malevolent green blade shimmers so close to my lower back you'd be smelling burnt butt-hairs without the suit. Then the underwater propellers kick in, spin me back in position and I uncurl like a spring, boots planted firmly in the exact same spot I just left.

The weird axe-gun got cleaved in half. Slight miscalculation on our part, apologies.

About four of the ten remaining bots are paying attention to me, the others focus on my fellow humans. A powered punch later, three of them are paying attention to me and a fourth is trying to locate his asshole from inside his chest cavity.

Armor mode soaks up two hits before completely draining the battery, forcing ol' Raider to use the time honed technique of 'Bug out and call it even.'

But now I'm in a crossfire and it seems like my new friends are trying to scrap me along with R2-D2's meaner cousins.

Here I am, barely more than some guy in Kevlar catsuit, stuck between entrenched 'Non-friendlies' and undead, hyper-heavily armed 'solid hostiles'. The bow uncurls in a beep and an arrow perforates the first bot's face just as it lines up another shot. The thing's friends open fire, but I'm moving, weaving in the open terrain like a caffeinated butterfly. Even with an arrow to the face, number one keeps on coming and I soon find myself ducking right in the middle of his six other friends, who were really not that interested in my insignificant person before I came sliding to a stop not two feets from them.

Good thing is, I got about twenty-two percent charge built up now. The cloak crackles and I'm gone before they can fill the recently vacated space with green death rays.

The sand betrays my location, every step leaving a clear imprint, but a powered jump back to the outcrop takes care of that. There I duck and wait for the two goddamn triple-A batteries to recharge.

I know, it takes a lot of juice to power a lensing field, but, seriously, can't this suit be outfitted with a dynamo or something?

At least it recharges fast enough. By the time I'm back in the game, both sides have stopped looking for me and resumed killing one another.

The alien gun is still up here, as useless as before. The bow joins it soon enough.

Two shots in the face didn't cut it? This thing's useless.

There is no powered jump this time, instead, I sneak my way back in and give a straggler one big hug, recovering his weapon from the liquefied pond before retreating in one mighty leap.

Back on my safe little rock. The 'bots are now sandwiched between those meatsacks by the gunship and myself, and this time, they have no clear target to shoot at. I cloak, take aim, re-appear and take some pot shots at them until things get too hot, then I pop back out and wait for them to forget I ever existed.

Not a sound long term strategy, but four kills later, I'm looking at some decidedly more favorable odds of five against one… Five against four if the three morons quit shooting at me.

Using combined fire and sheer determination, the kids managed to drop one killer robot of doom. Nothing compared to my kill count? Of course, but I can turn invisible and become bulletproof, so that's hardly sporting.

The survivors are finally getting their act together and targeting the outcrop, every shot tearing a massive chunk out of it, to the point they're soon hammering an empty crater in the side of a dune.

Another of their numbers gets dropped by those pesky meatballs and they decide I'm dead.

Three of them open fire on the… Wow… They _eroded_ that VTOL to nothing but the bottom framework!

The Captain turns from gritty, marbles gurgling badass to shrieking pile of exposed muscles and bones. Two robots look back to see why their comrades stopped firing, but see only silver ponds, silver ponds and a mass of translucent honeycombs. They vanish in a flash before I can finish my job.

That leaves me with two live and very much scared humans to extract if I want answers on what's happening around here.

SECOND handles the translation as I call out:

"Friendly, cease fire!"

The man answers first, "We are not firing!"

Then the girl, "Sh-show yourself, then we…" And she goes quiet.

Yeah, we'll what? Talk? Have a cup of tea? Not that I have much choice… Well, I could just leave them here, but, I mean, they're humans! On another planet! What are the odds? SECOND tells me, but I don't pay attention.

Cloak gives way to armor and I drop the alien gun to show my empty hands.

The girl's hidden by the cockpit, her friend looks up from the troop bay. "Who are you?" He calls, carefully stepping out from cover.

"Call me Raider, I'm head of special research and combative division at Hargreave-Rasch Corporation."

That makes as much sense to them as it does to about anyone else. None.

Still, they introduce themselves, "This is Sergeant Velros, Imperial Guard pilot, I'm Corporal Kudrensky, Demolition man… Are you with the Ad Mechs?" He seems hopeful, like a positive answer would somehow make his life much easier.

Ad Mechs? "No."

The Captain had a gun, a laser weapon somewhat similar to old M series rifles, with a carrying handle and all. I take it and adjust the sling to my own frame.

"Are you human?" Ah, wise lass, that's the real question.

The air filter and helmet rescind, leaving only the visor, held in place by a CryFibril strap, like ski goggles.

Not sure what I look like now, I can feel a decent beard on my face about half an inch thick, same as for the hairs. Haven't shaved for a month or so, it shows.

"I try."

They look somewhat relieved. I tell them to stock up and be ready to move out in five. Vendetta, Whiskers and a handful of Russians landed twenty kliks south, we need to get there before that spotter calls in more of his friends.


End file.
